


Sleepover

by pigeon_hawk



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Fluff and Smut, Ideal first dates, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Pining, Sharing a Bed, Slight Canon Divergence, pillows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2020-07-27 15:09:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20048068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pigeon_hawk/pseuds/pigeon_hawk
Summary: Adam keeps falling asleep in Ronan's bed.





	1. Chapter 1

Ronan couldn't sleep. There was a boy in bed with him, radiating heat and the faint, almost electrical hum of magic, and it was everything he could do to lay there and stare at the ceiling while the existential crisis took hold.

This was something that happened now, apparently. Three nights this month Adam had fallen asleep on Ronan's bed, Calculus book propped up against his chest, and Ronan had tucked him in like a good mother and told himself not to dream too loudly.

The first night, he'd tried to sleep on the couch. He had hugged his arms to his chest, eyes screwed tight, willing himself toward unconsciousness, but it was like he'd shut all the sunlight and warmth in the universe behind a door and it was fifteen feet away, flooding his system with heat and deadly radiation. The thought of Adam's knees and shoulders moving against Ronan's sheets, his warm breath ghosting over Ronan's pillowcase, a thin line of drool escaping from gently parted lips and edging down Adam's cheek in a way that should have been gross and not at all compelling - these images burned inside of Ronan. He imagined the longing he'd been storing up in his chest as if it were hot embers raked together, whipped up by little gusts of wind and bursting into flame whenever he took a deep breath. He could feel the heat intensifying and dissipating in waves, burning brighter and brighter with every intake of oxygen, until he thought there was a reasonable chance he might actually catch fire. This was not an idle fear for someone who'd pulled nightmares and loaded weapons out of his dreams. If he fell asleep like this, could he burn the building down?

Ronan had spent a lot of time in that bed thinking about Adam. "Thinking" being both a literal and euphemistic term, because he _worried_ about Adam sometimes, about whether he was sleeping enough or eating enough or putting himself in harm's way, but he was also an eighteen year old boy with a room to himself and way too much time on his hands. The Virginia sun had fallen asleep in his bed, and he was going to burn up no matter where where he was. So Ronan got up, crossed into the cavern of his own bedroom, and lay down on the mattress next to Adam.

He didn't want to watch him sleep. That would have been creepy. But he lay awake all night and listened, eyes shut tight, burning up from the inside.

* * *

The second and third time Adam had apologized before falling asleep, which was stupid because Ronan had made it pretty clear that he would rather have him here at Monmouth than driving across town at two a.m. on less than four hours' sleep.

"Is somebody waiting up for you in that shithole apartment?" he'd asked. "Just sleep here, Jesus. I'll set an alarm," and if that wasn't as good as an engraved invitation then Ronan didn't know what was. Adam seemed like he'd understood - he'd stayed, anyway, and Ronan had curled up into the space beside him like a cat beside a hearth. Close, but not quite touching. Close, but not close enough to burn.

* * *

This time was different. It was different because Ronan fell asleep first and didn't have time to prepare himself physically or psychologically for the shock of Adam reaching across his stomach in the middle of the night, shirt hiked up and gently pressing the warm length of his thigh against the front of Ronan's jeans. There was nothing overtly sexual about it - the whole thing felt drowsy and innocent and weirdly domestic, which made it that more embarrassing when Ronan, sleep-stupid and confused, groaned and turned into Adam's touch, bending his knee and slipping it between Adam's thighs.

He heard a sharp intake of breath as Adam's whole body tensed up. His eyes snapped open, looking at Ronan with - what? Confusion? Embarrassment? They were both suddenly, undeniably awake.

"Jesus!" Ronan hissed, scrambling back a few inches and shoving Adam awkwardly away from him. But it turned out that Ronan had been crowding into Adam's space and not the other way around: Adam had been lying right on the edge of the bed and one shove was enough to tip him onto the floor, landing painfully on his ass if the brief and sharply efficient string of curses that came out of his mouth was anything to go by.

"You _fucker_," Adam said, and whimpered. "Jesus Christ, that hurt." The warmth of Adam's accent curled around every word and groan, and Ronan wanted, incongruously, to pull him back into bed and kiss him on the mouth and take whatever punishment followed. Had he always been this much of an idiot? But he didn't do any of the things that sprang to mind. Instead he sat up in bed and rubbed his face with one hand, trying to sound less shaken than he actually felt. "God dammit Adam, don't you have a home to go to?"

He expected Adam to throw something or make a joke or say something horrible but true that Ronan could memorize and repeat to himself any time he was in the mood for self-abuse, but Adam didn't say anything at all. He just got to his feet, grabbed his coat from the back of the chair, and left, wincing with every step.


	2. Chapter 2

“Are you two making sweet, manly love to one another yet, or is this some kind of protracted mating ritual?”

“Jesus, Blue,” Adam said, squirming in his seat. Ronan and Gansey were wandering around the run-down gas station convenience store looking for snacks while he and Blue sat in the car and watched the gas meter tick. “What the hell? We’re not – nothin’s goin’ on back here, thank you for asking.”

She eyed him in the rearview mirror, eyebrows raised, a knowing smile playing at the corners of her mouth. “You’re gonna have to talk to him eventually, you know. You can’t just keep falling asleep in his lap and hope he figures it out.”

Adam did not appreciate this crass distortion of what he’d regarded until now as, actually, a pretty sound strategy. Not exactly a _plan _– he had finals coming up, after all, and work, his weekends eaten up with applying for one minor scholarship after another, and he was still waiting on the answers to eight of his college applications. He didn’t have time to come up with a plan. Still, he felt like he was nudging them in the right direction. It had been months since Ronan kissed him in his childhood bedroom, warm and slow like he was asking a question he couldn’t remember the words to, and Adam felt like this was his answer – this careful, insistent, wordless affection. The longer they’d gone without talking about it the more impossible it seemed that they would ever bring up the subject directly, and honestly, that was fine by him. He didn’t _want_ to talk about it. Talking would ruin this fragile understanding between them, complicate an already complicated situation, because when he and Ronan talked they argued, and when they argued they brought out the worst parts of one another, and Adam didn’t need that from Ronan right now. He wasn’t exactly sure what he needed, except that these days it felt like he needed it all the time.

He and Ronan were spending all their time together now, laughing and driving and _not_ talking. Well – they talked constantly, but never about the terrifying concept of _them_. Ronan had grown up with a family that valued and loved him, so probably he should be better at feelings than he was, but neither of them had the vocabulary for shit like this.

Obviously the bed had been a mistake. It’d seemed like a really good idea when it occurred to him, but it turned out that Adam couldn’t stay awake long enough in Ronan's bed for anything interesting to happen. How was he supposed to know that the insomnia he’d been fighting for the last eleven years had nothing to do with anxiety or trauma or not getting enough to eat, and everything to do with sleeping on the shittiest mattresses money could buy?

God, he loved Ronan’s bed… it had this pillow-top thing that shaped itself to his hips and knees, and something about the springs that made his back not hurt in the morning, and five big, fluffy pillows that he knew probably cost fifteen bucks apiece and smelled like fabric softener and moss and… well, probably pheromones, he admitted, given the way his body always reacted when he pressed his face against them. It was the best of all possible beds. Adam would lay there and imagine the two of them, curled up side by side, braver in the dark or at least a little less careful. All their casual touches would somehow build to something better and more fervent, Ronan’s tongue and hands moving hotly over Adam’s skin, foul-mouthed and angry and short of breath, Jesus. He wondered whether Ronan was a biter. That was a thing, wasn’t it? God, he hoped so.

But he always fell asleep less than twenty minutes after his head hit those glorious pillows, even with coffee in his system, and while he appreciated the uninterrupted rest he had to admit that it wasn’t getting the job done.

“What,” he said calmly, eyes fixed on the convenience store entrance, “would you suggest that I do, then? Given your expertise in this area. How would you go about trying to pick up a nice gay man?”

She turned around in her seat to look at him, unbuckling her belt and ending up with her legs crossed in front of her, lotus-style. Adam thought that this probably wouldn’t have worked if she were the size of a normal person, and felt a tiny surge of affection for her. He liked the idea of her staying this size permanently, on into old age, swearing in front of her grandkids and cursing the patriarchy. “Oh, please." She said. "We all know you’re not after _men_.”

He narrowed his eyes.

“That’s not what I meant,” she laughed, biting her lip, “I mean, clearly you're both..." She stopped and shook her head. "Neither of you has any concept of personal space when it comes to the other one and I’m getting sick of watching you stare longingly at his ass, although, fine, I’ll _give_ _you _that even though I don’t know how you put up with his actual personality. I just mean. Ronan isn’t _men_. You're, like, important to him. I think maybe he hasn’t done anything because he doesn’t know if you’re sure.”

He could see why she would think that. “Maybe he’s not sure.” The words taste like glass in his mouth, but he’d been saying them to himself for weeks, hadn’t he? What if Ronan had changed his mind and just… didn’t know how to put things back the way they’d been before? What if he was trying to find a way to let Adam down gently?

Blue snorted. “Oh my God. Listen to you. This is why you have to _talk _to him. But if it makes you feel any better, I think he’s pretty god-damned sure about you. He’s from one of those species that mate for life.”

Adam almost smiled at that. “So, what – you think Ronan’s a swan?”

Blue pulled fistful of bobby pins out of her purse and started pulling back the loose strands of hair around her neck. “Definitely. Big angry bird that shits all over the place and tries to bite you if you get too close, what am I missing?”

The car door swung open and Ronan slid into the back seat, half a dozen red licorice ropes clutched in his left hand. “Hold this,” he said, pressing a half-empty bottle of Coke to Adam’s chest. Adam knew he was supposed to finish it. This was Ronan’s way of giving him things without having to ask permission, without it seeming like he’d thought about it at all. Adam sighed and settled back into the seat. “Actually, Blue, Gansey was just telling me the other day that you and Ronan have very similar personalities.” Blue grinned back at him, implacable. “You say the sweetest things,” she said, kissed Gansey on the cheek, and turned around, putting her feet up on the dashboard in front of her. Gansey seemed pleased and vaguely relieved at this response.

“Could we all put our seatbelts on, please? Daylight is wasting.”

“Yes, _Dad_.”

“I’m not calling you Daddy,” said Blue. “Just so you know.”

"I am excessively grateful to you for that, Jane, I hope you realize.”

Adam glanced down at Ronan’s thigh, already pressed up solid and warm against his own in spite of there being more than enough room in the back seat for three people. This – whatever they had between them now – felt _good_. But maybe Blue had a point. Not about him and Ronan _talking_, because even the thought of it made him want to change his name and move somewhere out west, but about making sure that Ronan knew he was serious. He could find a way to make his intentions clear. And then, if Ronan didn’t want to take things any further, he could just say so and Adam would finally know. It would suck, and maybe they’d stop talking for a while, but eventually they’d both get over it.

* * *

Two days later Adam had a plan.

They were sitting on the floor at Monmouth – him, Gansey, Noah and Blue. Adam had his Classical History notes spread out around him like the petals of a sunflower, organized by philosophical movement and century. He and Gansey were discussing Egyptian historians during the Hellenistic period when Ronan stomped inside, absolutely caked in mud from the elbows down.

“You’re cleaning that up,” Gansey called after him as he disappeared down the hall, voice firm but without heat. Adam hopped up and followed Ronan into the bathroom, trying to get his thoughts organized as he went.

“Do you think –“

Ronan was standing in the middle of the room, jeans already on the floor and kicked to one side, tank top pulled halfway over his head. Normally Adam would have tried not to stare, but he’d thought this through and he wanted to make this easy for Ronan – wanted to be transparent. So he let his gaze linger on the sharp lines of his tattoo cutting across pale skin, beautiful and angry in a way that suited him perfectly, and on the soft hairs leading down from his naval and disappearing below the waistband of snug black boxers, something Adam had seen before but was learning to appreciate. After a moment he looked Ronan in the eye and waited for his tongue to start working again.

“It’s not a free show, Parrish,” he smiled, hooking his thumbs in his waistband and yanking his boxers down in one quick movement just as Adam swiveled around and directed his eyes toward the ceiling. “Either make me a sandwich or get out.”

“I need your help later,” Adam said. His voice was higher than he’d meant it to be, almost a whine, but he couldn’t do anything about it now. Ronan turned on the shower head. Paused to let the water heat. Stepped inside.

Adam stood still and tried very hard not to picture him naked and wet.

“Yeah?”

“After my shift, if you can? I’m done with the thing on Tacitus, I think it’s OK, but I don’t want to just rely on the English translations. I was hoping you could… check my work.” God, the way that sounded.

“When do you get off?”

It was difficult to remember how to swallow.

“Ten.”

“Cool. I’ll pick you up.”

Adam grunted his vague appreciation and got out while he could still feel his legs. He told himself that this was going to be fine. He and Ronan hung out all the time. This was something he wanted to do, and it would be _fine_. He repeated that word to himself, over and over again, until he’d gathered up his notes and stuffed them into his bag. He said goodbye to Gansey, who kept asking him if he was sure that everything was all right in spite of repeated assurances, because obviously whatever Adam was going through was written all over his face.

He was glad he’d come on his bike today. He wouldn’t have gas money until next Tuesday, but riding his bike could be relaxing. He needed to use up some of this energy before it burned him to the ground.


	3. Chapter 3

"God damn, Parrish."

The tone he’d been going for was _irritated_, but when he saw Adam standing there in the lamplight, lips softly parted and shirt unbuttoned, Ronan’s voice broke and the whole thing came out sounding like he was having some kind of fucking spiritual awakening. Adam’s sleeves were rolled up to the middle of his forearms and Ronan marveled at the way his wrists worked as he closed each button with unselfconscious grace. Normally Adam waited until he got home from the factory to change out of his work clothes, but it looked like he'd tried to clean up before coming outside.

Adam looked up and caught him staring, probably with a stupid expression on his face. He smiled at Ronan just barely, like there was a joke he could make but wasn’t going to. “You’re 25 minutes late,” Ronan said, as though to clarify. He didn’t think he sounded very convincing.

"Somebody had an accident on the floor. They made us stay late to sign a statement."

Ronan perked up on hearing this news. "Severed arm?" he asked? “Head?”

Adam laughed and poured himself into the passenger seat, exhaustion making his movements heavy and imprecise. "Foreman threw out his back carrying some boxes up the stairs. He's all right, but they like to document that kind of thing."

Ronan hummed like this was a bit of a disappointment. "So. You ready to waste another hour of your irreplaceable youth on fucking Roman philosophy?"

Adam got quiet for a few seconds before saying, "Do you mind if we get something to eat, first? I forgot about lunch."

_And dinner_, Ronan filled in silently, turning the engine over and considering. "Pizza?" Adam ran his fingers through his hair and shrugged. "We could just go for coffee," he said. Which made sense, really – they’d need it to get him through the next couple of hours.

"Sure thing," Ronan said. “Coffee,” yanking his headphones out of the auxiliary port and flooding the car with what anybody else might have regarded as an aggressive auditory assault. Adam didn't flinch - he was used to it - which both pleased and irritated Ronan to an alarming degree. Adam leaned back and directed Ronan, with as few shouted words as possible, toward their destination.

It was an excellent little diner called "Raylene's," half a dozen dirty tables squeezed into the space between a gun shop and a nail salon, and the pie there was fucking incredible. They sat down on opposite sides of a tottering blue table and looked over their respective menus in silence. When Ronan asked for nothing but coffee - black - Adam shook his head and ordered them two slices of blackberry pie, one with ice cream and one without, and a basket of onion rings for the table. As soon as they showed up Adam pushed one of the slices of pie over to Ronan without a word. It was the one with ice cream.

Adam complained about finals and asked Ronan a lot of questions about animal husbandry, which Ronan had been reading about during his abundant free time. It was a weird subject at first but kind of compelling once you got into the details. It wasn't like Ronan was stupid - he knew things. They just weren't things that most other people wanted to talk about. Adam was telling him a story about their new Latin professor (the fourth one now in two years) coming in to work smelling like pot - apparently he'd thought it was pipe tobacco - when Ronan felt Adam hook his ankle around his own, sliding his foot gently up and down the back of Ronan’s calf, at which point Ronan forgot for several seconds whether or not he was supposed to breathe.

It was such a deliberate action that Ronan had no idea what to do with it. It wasn’t like the reassuring but careless affection he was used to from Adam, Adam falling asleep with his head on Ronan’s shoulder or invading his space on a crowded sofa. It was the kind of thing you couldn't shrug off or pretend hadn't happened. What made it truly unnerving was the way that Adam managed to just _talk _through it, smiling and making perfectly normal eye contact, while Ronan's heart was pounding in his ears.

When Ronan came back from the bathroom Adam was leaning against the wall beside the door, staring at the painted ivy on the ceiling.

“You ready?” Adam said.

“Don't we have to pay first?" Ronan asked.

"I got it,” he said, meaning the check. Which was… out of character, to put it mildly. Weird, to be more precise. A part of Ronan wanted to object just for the sake of being argumentative, but the thing was over and done and _fine_, and he didn’t want to make Adam uncomfortable by actually talking about it. Adam grabbed him by the arm and pulled him outside before Ronan could think of anything to say, wishing Raylene a good night and climbing into the passenger's seat while Ronan stood there on the sidewalk, feeling slightly off balance.

*******

Adam didn't want to go home right away. He said he had something he wanted to show Ronan first, something which required that they drive fifteen miles out of town on shitty gravel roads that weren’t made for decent city cars. If Ronan didn't puncture a tire it would be a fucking miracle.

"Are you taking me out here to kill me? Because you didn’t need to go to all this trouble."

They parked on the shoulder and ventured out into the high grass of a wide, unkempt field, using Ronan's phone as a flashlight to avoid tripping on rabbit holes or unexpected rocks. A short way from the road there was a squat, unimpressive hill made out of dirt and sand packed together like it'd been dumped there when the road was built. It was about two feet high and maybe fifteen feet wide. Adam stepped up and sat down in the middle of the thing, grinning like a cat with a dead mouse in its jaws.

"I'm gonna be honest, Parrish. This looks like a fucking field."

"Come on over here," Adam said, and lay down on his back to stare up at the sky, arms behind his head. It was true that there were a lot of stars out here - no more than at the Barns, but stars were worth wasting a little time on no matter where you happened to be. That was one thing Ronan had never understood about people who lived in the city. People needed to work, he supposed, because people needed food and plumbing and a place to sleep, but what was the point if of living if you had to give up everything that made you a person? Why would you live somewhere if it meant giving up the stars? He gave up without a fight and came and sat down heavily beside Adam. Adam reached up and brushed his fingers against the fabric bunched up at Ronan's waist, sending an invisible shock straight to Ronan's spine, and said with perfect indifference, the fucker - "Go slow when you lay down. And watch the stars." Then -

"Oh, shit." Ronan sat up straight again, scanning the sky above him. For a moment, just before his shoulders had hit the ground, everything had shifted. "What the fuck did you do?" Adam just grinned up at him, silent and superior, and shrugged. Ronan moved to lay down again, more slowly this time, watching for the split second when the sky above them twitched, darkness blooming into indigoes and greens like oil spilled on asphalt, all the constellations vanishing and blinking back into existence in new configurations.

Adam nudged him in a friendly way. "It's not Cabeswater, if that's what you're worried about. All of that's - " his voice cut out, something mournful about the last word, and pressed himself against Ronan's shoulder. "This is different. I think it's part of whatever was here before, some kind of substrate. It's connected to the leyline but it's broken into pieces all over this area. I found a few others but this one’s my favorite."

"I didn't know you still had the thing. With the leyeline. I thought that was over." Adam sighed but didn’t offer any explanation, just lay there, warm against Ronan's side, and Ronan thought about kissing him. "It feels different now, but it's still there. I don't mind it." Ronan wondered if magic could ever be like that for him - if he could dream something and not feel intrinsically responsible for it, like whatever horrible things escaped from his dreams were just the manifestation of his own sublimated desires.

Adam turned to look at him, a little crease above his brow. His mouth was just a few inches away, and Ronan wondered what would happen if he reached out a hand and brushed his fingers across Adam's lips. Would the stupid, terrible thing finally happen, or would Adam just laugh and get up, pretend that nobody had meant anything by it, and keep them safe and comfortable and _friends_, exactly the way they'd always been before?

The ground beneath them was different as well. It tickled the back of Ronan’s neck, and he craned his neck to look at it. They were stretched out on a carpet of milfoil and clover, staring up at somebody else's sky. Ronan pulled out his phone and held it a few inches from Adam's face, feeling a little smug.

"Oh," said Adam, and snatched the phone out of his hand. Ronan hadn't spent a lot of time playing with the Astronomy app he'd downloaded last winter. It was more of a distraction for when Opal wouldn't stop asking him questions and he needed some goddamned quiet, but Adam figured out the navigation and started searching for familiar constellations, seeing if anything lined up.

"We're oriented differently,” he said at last. “In terms of north and south. But it's the same time of year, I think. Wrong time of day," He turned the screen toward Ronan. Adam had synced up the stars on Ronan’s phone with the ones they were looking at, star for star. "I think this is the sky over Myanmar."

"Jesus."

Ronan lay there for another fifteen minutes while Adam talked about the astronomical features they could see, nebulae and planets, a galaxy that looked like an eye if you clicked on the "more information" symbol that popped up beside it. Adam lay his head down on Ronan's shoulder and his breath warmed the fabric of Ronan’s T-shirt. When Ronan took the phone back, Adam reached across his stomach and threaded their fingers together, still and undemanding, and Ronan was so happy that he thought maybe he could die here and everything would be fine.

Ronan drove back to Adam's place with the windows down, one hand on the wheel. Adam was still holding onto his right hand, wordless and reassuring, like he didn't want to say anything about it and didn't think he had to. Everything Adam said, every tired or sarcastic or smart remark that fell from his lips felt good and safe, and for a while Ronan forgot that his best friend was going to leave in three months and would never come back. Everything about tonight felt both good and terrible, sort of... _electric_. Partly because he was awake and excited, and partly because it felt like one of them was about to stick a screwdriver in a light socket.

*******

The last few minutes of the drive to Adam's apartment were quiet. They were both tired. Adam had already spent several minutes fighting with the door to the stairwell when he muttered something angrily under his breath, shoulders hunched, and announced that they weren't getting in that way. He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair, making it stick up in the back.

He led Ronan around the side of the church to a spot where the brick wall butted up against the church's battered garden fence. The streetlights didn't reach very far into the shadows here, but there wasn't a lot to trip over besides the weeds and a few crumbling bricks here and there. They stopped at the place where the fence met up with the wall, and Adam looked up at a window seven or eight feet off the ground.

"It looks like it's closed but the latch doesn't work. I keep meaning to ask them to fix the lock on the front door, but I always forget. It's not like it's broken, it's just... old. It works most of the time."

"Yeah, yeah," Ronan said. "If you wanted me to help you break into a church, all you had to do was ask."

Adam kissed him.

It was… soft. It was almost painfully slow and tender, like Adam was afraid he would topple something inside of Ronan if he pressed too hard, which was in fact the case. It was the answer to a question Ronan had asked Adam a long time ago and given up hope of ever getting a straight answer to, but now Ronan wasn't sure he wanted to hear it. Was this how they were saying goodbye? Months before Adam packed up his shit and left town, like he wanted a piece of Ronan that he could take with him, a souvenir he could put on his bookshelf and take down whenever he wanted. The weight of Ronan's affection pressed down relentlessly on his chest, forcing the breath out of him, making his ribs and shoulders ache.

And then it was over. Ronan hated himself a for not just enjoying this thing between them, whatever it was, just as he hated himself for letting it happen at all, until Adam pressed him urgently up against the wall and kissed him again, a little more insistently. This time everything was different and disorienting - Ronan couldn’t stop himself from reaching out and grabbing hold of Adam, hands finding their way to Adam's hip and the small of his back, pulling him closer. Adam slipped his tongue into the space between Ronan’s teeth and shuddered softly in Ronan’s arms, serious and insistent, like if he didn’t get this right then he would never forgive himself.

Ronan pulled back when he felt pins and needles in his fingertips and realized that he probably needed to breathe. He hugged held Adam close to his chest, suddenly terrified that he would disappear or change the way that people did in dreams, and stayed that way until the alarm bells in his brain stopped clamoring wildly. Ronan could feel Adam's muscles tense and relax underneath the fabric of his shirt and wanted desperately to lay his head down on Adam’s stomach, letting the rise and fall of his breathing put him to sleep. He seemed so still compared to the mess inside of Ronan's head.

"Hey." Adam breathed into the space between them, rubbing slow circles into his back, careful and reassuring.

"Hey," Ronan answered, placing a kiss on Adam's neck, trying to catalogue the taste and feeling of his skin. Ronan absent-mindedly sucked at the spot below Adam’s ear, and Adam sucked in a short breath. "Jesus," he swore. Ronan loved him, and loved the weight of him in his arms, and knew that he would never recover if he did not put a stop to this right now.

"Come up," said Adam, reaching down and taking Ronan's hand in his own, kissing the knuckles. "Come on up."

Adam wanted him. He wanted to have this one good thing before he left, a part of Ronan that he could keep, and what did it matter if it damaged something inside of him that he couldn’t replace? Why shouldn't Adam Parrish get whatever the fuck he wanted for the rest of his life?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! Sorry this took me so long - I had an ending planned, and then I changed my mind. Apparently I have no concept of how long it will take to resolve a plot, so it's four chapters now. Also kissing is complicated and weird and involves mouths?


	4. Chapter 4

He'd done it.

He'd fucking done it, and now it would all come crashing down on his head like a house on fire because Adam hadn’t once stopped to consider what he would do if everything went the way he’d planned. He'd been so focused on getting to this point - on getting anywhere with Ronan, really - that now, watching him climb deftly up the side of the building and through the open window, Adam's mind seemed to have decided that it had done A Very Good Job and deserved to take the rest of the night off.

There was a heavy thump as Ronan landed, his silhouette dropping out of the window frame and into the fraying dark. They were in a small room behind the sanctuary – Adam didn’t know what it was called – where they kept the candlesticks and choir robes and extra hymnals. Ronan shuffled across the open room and came to a stop with his boots barely touching the toes of Adam's shoes, breathing softly into the space between them.

"You bring all your dates up here?" He could hear the smile in Ronan's voice, the note of anxiety.

Adam didn't think ever been on a real date before, and he was pretty sure Ronan knew that. “Nah, not really. But I should, right? It makes me seem like a bad influence. Sort of cool, you know?”

“Oh, man. It _really_ doesn’t.”

Adam huffed out a laugh and put a hand gingerly on Ronan's arm, steadying himself, and then steered him out into the sanctuary like a reluctant bride.

The church smelled like cedar and incense. It was a little brighter in here than the room they'd just left. The streetlights were shining through one of the stained glass windows and throwing ribbons of weak blue and yellow light across the far wall, catching Ronan in the chest, casting his sharp features in chiaroscuro, and Adam didn’t know if “beautiful” was the right word, so he didn’t say anything. Instead he stopped Ronan in the middle of the aisle and kissed him, carefully, solemnly, still very much surprised that this was something he was allowed to do. Ronan opened his mouth and slid his hand down to Adam's waist, pulling him closer, relaxing against his chest. Neither of them was in much of a hurry to get where they were going. Adam was glad to know that making out in his own church didn't bring up any deep-seated moral dilemmas for Ronan, which was something he’d wondered about from time to time. After a few minutes Adam made an impatient noise and Ronan smiled against his lips, tugged him closer, and held him in place while he slid his tongue deeper into his mouth and grabbed Adam’s ass.

“Mm!” Adam squeaked, disentangling himself. “Um…”

“Sorry.”

Adam shook his head and laughed, slightly breathless, but he couldn’t think of any words. How did people talk about things like this? “Come here,” he managed, and led Ronan the rest of the way to his apartment through dark, narrow hallways, fingers wrapped around the hem of his shirt, wordless and terrified.

Adam locked the door behind him and switched on his desktop lamp. He was buzzing with weird energy, almost too anxious to be happy. What was he supposed to do now that he had a boy in his room? A stupid question, because Ronan had been in his room before, even slept here, but there had been different rules then. Or had there? Could they have been doing this the entire time? Shit.

Ronan came up behind him, wrapping his arms loosely around Adam's waist while he kissed a line down Adam's neck, sending little shivers down his spine. "Well?" Ronan said. It was the kind of “well” that meant, “Well, what do we do now?”, and it was said with such open affection, such a total lack of expectation, that it almost hurt to hear it.

He didn’t know what he’d done to earn that kind of affection from anyone.

Adam had spent most of his childhood thinking that something was wrong with him, that anyone who got too close would start to notice how everything was a little off - warped by violence and loneliness all his stupid, aching need, but Ronan had figured out what was wrong with him and nothing had changed. Ronan liked shitty people. Ronan was bitter and petty and sarcastic, and liked it when Adam was bitter and petty, too, even if it was sometimes directed at him. He liked things that bit him back.

With a little more courage than he actually felt, Adam pushed Ronan backward until he was sitting on the bed and then climbed, unceremoniously, into his lap.

“Hi there,” Ronan said, his eyes wide, smirking. Adam smiled and wrapped his hand around the back of Ronan’s neck, kissed him again for good luck, and started to grind up against Ronan’s lap. Ronan’s mouth fell open. “God,” he groaned, eyes fluttering closed, fingers tightening around Adam’s bicep and in his hair. Adam honestly hadn’t realized how good this would feel – even through layers of fabric, every part of his body was _aching _for it, the unbelievably sweet friction and the sound of Ronan gasping when he managed to get everything lined up just right. Adam had always had a sort of… utilitarian view when it came to masturbation. Quiet, efficient, any kind of lubricant you could get your hands on. But Ronan was incredible like this - warm and sharp and _talkative_, though Adam wasn’t sure he understood everything coming out of his mouth. He loved the rough texture of Ronan’s buzz cut, the heat of his mouth, the firm pressure of Ronan’s fingertips tucked into the back of Adam’s jeans, and, _oh_ – shit. That was what he wanted.

“Get up,” he said, sliding backward and standing beside the bed to wait, jittery and warm all over

Ronan just sat there looking dazed.

"Please?" he said, and Ronan got up looking a little disappointed. As soon as he was on his feet, Adam started working on his belt. “OK, Jesus Christ,” Ronan said, his hands shaking, and tugged at the button on Adam's jeans. Adam pulled Ronan's shirt over his head, tucked his fingers inside the elastic band at the front of Ronan's boxers, and breathed into his ear - "I don't know how to get your boots off."

Ronan looked seriously annoyed when he dropped to the floor and got to work on his laces, but when he called Adam a "fucking nightmare", it sounded like a compliment.

While he was waiting, Adam shucked off his own jeans and, a little reluctantly, tossed his shirt in the corner, feeling self-conscious about the scar on his shoulder and the way his ribs still stuck out after months of Sunday dinners at Blue and Maura’s house. It was hard not to make comparisons between the two of them: Ronan, broad-shouldered and muscular, self-assured, and Adam, skinny, damaged, perpetually angry.

Except that right now Ronan was sitting on the floor, jeans trapped around his knees, trying to tug off his left boot with an obvious erection. Adam bit back a laugh. Ronan looked up at him and stopped what he was doing, eyes raking over Adam’s body, lingering at certain places. Adam got very still. "God,' Ronan said. Reverently. Indecently. "Look at you."

* * *

Half an hour later, sticky and tired, Adam rolled out of bed and announced that he was taking a shower. "This is disgusting. Why am I the only one covered in this… stuff?"

"I feel like you know the answer to that question," Ronan said, and Adam had the good sense to look embarrassed.

"Is there room for two people in there?"

Adam's mouth fell open slightly at the suggestion. "It's cold," he said. "There was a thing with the water heater - "

"Yeah, yeah, never mind," Ronan said, rolling over onto his stomach and burying his face in the pillow. "I'll be here."

He heard Adam's footsteps padding along the floor, the scrape of the bathroom door, and tried to relax.

This was the worst fucking bed imaginable. After a few minutes of moving around to try and find a comfortable position, Ronan got up and walked around the apartment, drank a glass of water, and started poking into drawers searching for anything that could be used as lube. Just in case.

He sat down at Adam's desk and started looking for his Latin homework, figuring that he could at least take a look at it. It was right there on top of a frankly ridiculous collection of library books. He read through the first few paragraphs, smiling. He liked being reminded of how smart Adam was. It was obvious the minute he opened his mouth, unless you were some kind of asshole who thought that "smart" was about sounding like you came from money instead of the way you framed an argument. There was a minor translation issue on the second page, an obscure idiomatic phrase that Adam had taken as literal, so Ronan started digging around in the desk drawers looking for a pencil.

That's how he found the letters.

There was a stack of them in the second drawer - envelopes still intact, neatly arranged, post-it notes on each one covered in unreadable shorthand. He started pulling them out, one by one. Harvard, UC Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Mr. Parrish," they all began. "We are pleased to offer you..."

He was still sitting there when Adam came back. He was wearing a clean pair of boxers and a T-shirt, hair ruffled and damp, and he was leaving, and there was nothing Ronan could do about it.

"Hey," he said, his voice worried and tired.

"You got into Berkeley." It wasn't an accusation. It just... sounded like one.

Adam’s shoulders went up defensively. "I’m still waiting on a few schools. I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

Ronan was trying to keep the misery out of his voice. He was happy for Adam. He was proud of him and in love with him, and he didn’t know what someone like Adam could possibly want from someone like Ronan. “Berkeley was your first choice, though, right? Or MIT, you kept changing your fucking mind."

Adam shifted his feet and took a deep breath. “I've been thinking about Duke, maybe? It’s on the list.”

Ronan scoffed, eyes still scanning the letter in front of him, worried what Adam would read in his expression if he looked him in the eye. "What the fuck do they have at Duke?”

“Well, for one thing, it's only three hours away."

***

Ronan looked up at Adam, his expression unreadable.

“I could come home on the weekends,” Adam explained. “I mean, not every weekend, but... If you wanted me to.” When there was no response he tried again, sounding worried. “Ronan?”

Ronan got to his feet, running a hand over the back of his neck, his eyes narrowed. "You got into _Harvard_."

Adam frowned and crossed his arms protectively over his stomach. "Duke is a good school. The head of their biomedical engineering program is really good, I read this paper she wrote - "

"What the fuck is wrong with you, Parrish?"

Adam's heart rate shot up at the sudden violence in Ronan's voice, and that familiar sensation - knowing he'd done something wrong but not know what it was - hit him with sickening speed. "You're not coming back here. That's not how this works. You graduate, you get the fuck out of town, and then you _don't come back_." Adam didn’t know what to say. What had just happened tonight? A little while ago Ronan had been jerking Adam off with a fair amount of enthusiasm, and now it seemed like he couldn’t get rid of him fast enough.

“No, you know what? I can’t deal with this right now.” Ronan yanked his shirt over his head in one sharp movement. He stomped across the room, grabbed his jeans off the floor, and slammed the door behind him, leaving Adam alone.

Except that Adam was never really alone.

"You little _shit_," his mother's voice hissed in his good ear. "What's wrong with you? I swear to God you make him angry on purpose." He felt like he'd been in a car wreck. All of his muscles were clenched tight, bracing for violence, knowing that just like every other time this had happened in his life, it didn’t really matter whether he'd done something wrong or not. The thing that was wrong was _him_. He forced himself to breathe.

Adam sat down on his bed and shut his eyes. He counted to ten, to a hundred, and let the anger and rejection wash over him. Things like this happened. People disappointed you. He sat there for a long time - fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, letting his heart rate slow, but when he opened his eyes he was staring at Ronan's boots.

Ronan had left them in the middle of the floor. Did he drive home barefoot? What the hell? A thought occurred to Adam, then, and he groaned, hating himself, knowing that he should just go to bed, shouldn't ask the question, shouldn't bother. He opened the front door to his apartment, and there was Ronan sitting sideways at the top of the stairs, back against the wall, bare feet on concrete.

“I can drive to Berkeley,” he said before Adam could get a word out. “Or Cambridge, or whatever. It’s not like I’ve got better things to do.”

“Why would you drive to Berkeley? I’m sure you can find somebody local to stick their tongue up your ass or whatever it is you’re into. I’m too tired to deal with your bullshit right now, Lynch, just. Get off my fucking stairs.”

Ronan’s face crumpled. He didn’t move.

“Oh, fuck you! I need sleep!”

“I shouldn’t have said that to you,” Ronan whispered. It was almost an apology. “I’m not gonna tell you what to do. You just scared the shit out of me is all.”

“OK,” said Adam, lost in this pointless exchange and growing impatient.

Ronan rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t want him to know how to find you.”

It took Adam a minute to figure out who Ronan was even talking about. When he did, parts of their conversation started to make sense. He had a hazy feeling that Ronan had tried to tell him something like this before, but that Adam hadn’t been listening.

Ronan’s voice was coming apart at the edges. “I don’t want him to _recognize you in pictures_.” It was proof of how isolated Adam had been growing up, but it had never occurred to him that fear was a communicable disease – that someone could be afraid for you in a way that wasn’t condescending or secretly about them. He sat down on the floor, just inside the door frame, so that he and Ronan were facing one another, and wrapped his fingers loosely around Ronan’s ankle.

“OK,” he said again. He was listening now.

"I have this nightmare," Ronan said, "where you and me are walking out of a movie theater at night and your dad sideswipes us with his pickup truck. You always get out of the way in time while I get smeared across a wall or some shit, and then I get to lay there with a broken spine and watch him beat the shit out of you with a tire iron."

"That's... kind of messed up."

Ronan laughed, angry, helpless. "I keep telling myself I'm supposed be happy you're leaving, because the further away you get the safer you'll be. I used to drop you off at night at that fucking trailer and worry that I wouldn't ever see you again. I'll drive to Berkeley every other week if you let me, I don't give a shit, I just want you to be OK."

Some mixture of relief and affection and anger rose up in Adam’s chest and threatened to choke him. "Look,” he said, trying to pour all his stupid feelings into the words. “I'm not gonna cede that asshole an entire town. I don't care if he knows I'm alive. Maura’s basically adopted me at this point, if I don’t at least show up for Christmas she’ll never forgive me." Adam ran his fingers up and down the inside of Ronan’s calf. He took a deep breath. Tried to keep the panic out of his voice. “When I was a kid, nothing was safe. There wasn’t anybody I could talk to – teachers, doctors, other kids. There was nowhere I could go that it wouldn’t get back to him. Anything I tried just would’ve made things worse." His throat was tight, but he was safe, he was safe, this was how it was supposed to be. "But I'm OK now. I mean, no," he said, because Ronan had given him a Look, "I'm not "fine", but I'm better than I was. I never thought I’d have... people. Who wanted me around.”

Ronan crawled over to him and put his head in Adam’s lap, wrapping his arms around his waist.

“Come on,” Adam said. “Get up.” He pulled Ronan to his feet and they got into bed. They lay there tangled up together, awkwardly sharing Adam’s one pillow, breathing each other in and trying to get comfortable. Ronan kept flopping around and Adam swatted at him with the back of his hand. “This bed is a goddamned hazard, Parrish,” Ronan said, words slow and thick. “How do you fucking sleep?”

Adam laughed hysterically until Ronan clapped a hand over his mouth, hugging him to keep him still, kissing and touching until they both, finally, fell asleep.


End file.
